IMO it would have been a better case if the student said "no, I'm not going to change it, what are you going to do about it"? Cause what is unclear from that summary is what the student was actually threatened with as punishment. If you take away stuff like suspension, expulsion, or withholding grades, then yeah it does just look like faculty trying to teach a real-world lesson.
Still, it would be a terrible precedent to set, and will be interesting to see what happens at the next level.